How Did Every Transformer Co-author Leaving Google After 13 Years of Decision Shifts Create a Bigger Debacle Than Kodak Missing Digital Cameras?

Google maintained great culture, great leadership, and great intentions yet still lost key innovation capability. Decisions gradually shifted from customer benefit to company benefit to personal benefit of the decision maker. The resulting loss of the transformer invention exceeds the scale of Kodak missing digital cameras in corporate value destruction.

One former employee with 13 years at Google described the progression. The transformer technology that is the basis of all modern LLMs was invented at Google. Not a single one of the co-authors commercialized the transformer at Google. Every single one had to leave and do it elsewhere. Companies with hundreds of billions of dollars of valuation were created by ex-Google people.

Calculations of opportunity cost show a bigger corporate debacle from a value loss perspective than Kodak failing to commercialize a digital camera. Corruption proves corrosive to long term value creation.